Books by the bed

Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl: A NovelCan't-put-it-down double-crossing thriller --- read it in case you need reminding that getting involved with a narcissistic sociopath is always unwise. There's a twist in the middle that'll give you whiplash, vertigo, or both. Ending didn't work for me, however... kind of a whimper, not a bang. Almost like the author ran out of steam. (***)

Neal Pollack: JewballI don't read sports novels, but this is exceptional. I just love the characters --- reprobate, nominally criminal Jewish basketball stars on a sharp urban Philly league. Playing under impossible conditions as the Nazis ascend to power in Germany, and the Bund (SS sympathizers in US) try to bring them down in America. Feisty, funny, gum-cracking and delightful. (***)

Books I'm listening to in the car

Sena Jeter Naslund: Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.)I don't like historical fiction. I have very little interest in the French monarchy. But Sena Jeter Nashland, whose first novel could not've been more different, is a brilliant writer, and has me utterly pulled into this world, time, and place, and given me sympathy towards a person to whom I had none. A novel like this reminds me of why I fall in love with fiction, over and over again. Transporting, tragic, and deeply fascinating. (****)

Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife: A NovelAlice Lindgren Blackwell's normal-enough middle-class Wisconsin life goes through the windshield twice, once quickly and literally (a car wreck when she is in her early teens, in which she kills the young man who just may have been the love of her life) and once very slowly, and for a long, long time (when she marries Charlie, a super-wealthy, basically incompetent charmer with fierce political ambitions, who ends up --- somewhat to everyone's surprise --- in the White House).
An imagining of a life loosely based on Laura Bush's, Sittenfield's writing is unshow-offy, as unobtrusive and accommodating as her careful protagonist, who tries to walk the impossible line of being "good wife" to a public figure with whose actions, public and private, she does not always agree, and cleaving to her own conscience, which may have gotten lost somewhere along the way.
The book is inhabited by carefully drawn, detailed, dimensional characters: Alice's off-again-on-again best friend, her wise, quietly lesbian grandmother, the members of the dynasty into which she has married. An endless war, a weak wealthy husband saved from being a total wash-up by the embrace of a Christianity Alice herself does not understand, a bereaved parent whose son has died in the war, who attempts to meet the president ... all these echo the tragedy of the Bush years from an imagined perspective. Yet finally the novel rings true not because of this echo, but because Sittenfeld has created characters and a plot as complex, flawed, and mysterious as life itself.
(****)

Ben Hewitt: The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local FoodHewitt raises more questions and hypotheses than he answer... one has the sense that he was grappling with issues that were too large for him, and the subject of the book, the food-centric (sort of) hardscrabble town of Hardwick, Vermont. I got frustrated with his asides and a certain precious town that occasionally crept in, but I couldn't help but find it enthralling.
He tries to make peace with the fact that environmentally sound, home gardening, and incremental agricultural semi-self-sufficiency may be elitist and nay not be economically sustainable. But that our present-day food system is also frighteningly fragile and unhealthful in any way, and simply would work unsubsidized: 1 single fast-food mega-ag calorie on the plate takes an average of ***95*** calories of fossil fuel to get from seed to plate.
A gardener himself, Ben Hewitt writes: "The scale on which my family and I grow food is arguably inefficient, in terms of economics, efficiency, and land use. We don't utilize chemical fertilizers, synthetic weed and pest control, or genetically modified seed; these things could probably boost production in the short run, but then, we don't farm for the short run.
"I can buy a fine potato from any number of local farmers, but (not) the May afternoon I spent w/ Penny in the garden, sticking our hands deep into the cool soil. I can buy a head of lettuce, but (not) the pleasure & pride of my boys returning from the garden w/ a basket of greens & saying 'We picked it ourselves, Papa.' "
And, in this Monsanto-fast food-fake-food world... being willing and able to feed yourself, even partially is a true "Occupy" act. Hewitt quotes a farmer named Eliot Coleman: "Small farmers are the last bastion protecting society from corporate industry. When we feed ourselves, we become unconquerable."
I wish this book had been better edited: someone needed to keep Hewitt more on track and focused, with fewer asides. He needed to be less anecdotal and more fact-based, or more anecdotal and... Well. Still very much worth a read. (***)

Ayun Halliday: Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable TasteA feisty memoiristic series of vignettes, from growing up in Indiana and aspiring to Betty Crocker Enchanted Castle cakes with a mom who aspired to Julia Child and a fried-chicken-and-mashed-potato cooking grandmother to the author's own "postcoital breakfasts", labor, deliveries, and childrearing (one picky eater, one not). Categorized on the jacket as "FOOD / HUMOR" it is both, sort of. A recipe, written slap-dash but followable, and certainly with personal, um, zest, follows each chapter. It kept me somewhat amused; it kept me reading; and it did warn "questionable taste." The latter was over-the-top for me; a combination of TMI, reliance on gross-out, and a few too many gratuitous 'fucks' crossed the just-have-to-drop-the-#-of-stars line. Ayun's a good writer; a little less smart-assiness and a little more depth to the revelations, and I could be done for the cause with her. (**)

Books in my (writing/creativity/teaching) office

Carolyn G. Heilbrun: The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond SixtyThe perplexing, brilliant and thoughtful Carolyn Heilbrun, a feminist and academic (who also wrote mysteries under the name of Amanda Cross) on various aspects of aging, as well as the people --- some well-known, like writer May Sarton, some not, like her husband --- who have crossed her life. She is smart, stubborn, and interesting. The last chapter, "On Mortality", is particularly good. It's not a how-to, a self-help book, oir an inspirational read; rather, it is a thoughtful and personal exploration about the span and depth of one individual, intellectual life. (***)

Laraine Herring: The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True VoiceIf you take an holistic approach to creativity (I do) you'll find much to like in Herring's suggested writing practice, and the thoughtful, story-rich anecdotes about the ever-cycling nature of writing.
Herring's been compared to Julia Cameron (The Arist's Way) and there are some similarities. But where Julia Cameron comes out of a 12-step program and brings that perspective, Herring is a yoga teacher, so her mind-body-spirit lens, and the language with which she describes it, differs. There's a little more emphasis on the importance of craft in addition to process, and she comes across with more humility than Cameron, at least, to me. Good addition to a writer's library, and interesting suggestions for setting up a beginner's practice... no matter how experienced you are. (***)

Twitter Updates (yes, God help me)

Hollywood

June 20, 2010

Walking yesterday, up near Frazier's sugar shack here in Vermont, I heard an animal rustle in the underbrush edging the woods by the gravel road. Though I stood stock-still and watched, I couldn't see what it was. Too large for a chipmunk or a squirrel, smaller by far than a deer, I was left only with the sudden sound of its movement.

But that was enough. It brought back a particular moment to me as vividly as if it had happened an hour earlier. This was a moment with my late father, the writer Maurice Zolotow, who has been dead now almost twenty years.

But, when I heard that unseen animal, he was alive to me again. "No one ever steps in the same river twice," wrote the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus, "for it is not the same river and one is not the same
person. " I feel that way, too, about memory's river, into which I necessarily step when I think about Maurice.

Another river, the King's, in Northwest Arkansas, is involved in the
moment I recalled.

(The one pictured left is not "ours" , which I'm about to tell you about, but one
photographed by Sheila L. Chambers for Birdwatcher's
Digest).

As is the inadvertent transmission of wisdom, with which sometimes, if we are fortunate, our parents gift us, almost incidentally.

I've written about Maurice here often, most notably in this post. So I''ll give only a brief back-story. For it was a long way from the circumstances of his birth and later life to the King's River.

Born Morris Zolotoff on November 23, 1913, in Brooklyn, New York, he was a first-generation American who was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Like many of similar background, his idea of sophisticated, upper class America was informed by the movies, and it was towards this world he gravitated, eventually writing magazine articles (for Billboard, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look, Life, and, later, Playboy, Reader's Digest, and Los Angeles) and books, mostly about entertainment figures, musical, theatrical, and cinematic.

Sometime between his graduation from New Utrect High School and his entry into the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Morris became Maurice.

He could (and did) legitimately drop names and anecdotes across an astonishing spectrum: Duke Ellington ("The only place we could eat in together in New York was a Chinese restaurant," he told me many times. But no matter how many times he said it, it was never without a tightening of his mouth, a slight shake of his head, and a tone of outrage. Racism of any type was incomprehensible to him. He recognized its reality, but, to him, it was so despicable it defied belief, let alone acceptance).

He gave Count Basie his first national review (in Billboard), and interviewed most of the sex goddesses of his time: Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe (about whom he would write many articles, and then the first of her countless book-length biographies), Ursula Andress (best known for her role as Honey Ryder, the Bond Girl in Dr. No), and Grace Kelly (she may have been a princess, but he wrote about her --- making her his subject!).

The now all-but-forgotten outrageous show-business personality/actress Tallulah Bankhead remained memorable to him: during an interview he did in her apartment, she got up to use the bathroom, and continued talking, leaving the door open, as she urinated. She also had a parrot, which she allowed to fly uncaged, It swooped around her living-room room, to my father's great unease, its droppings cleaned up by a maid who stood on guard. Comedians? He interviewed dozens: Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Dudley Moore, Fred Allen, Allan Sherman, countless others.

For a change of pace (and probably because he needed the money) he even took on John Wayne. In the picture above right, there's the Duke, with Ann-Margret and my father. This was taken on the set of The Train Robbers, released in 1973, a year before my father's biography of Wayne, Shooting Star, was published).

As I said in the previous post I did about him, at the time of his death he was working on a memoir to be called "Famous People Who Have Known Me." Which about says it all.

Except it doesn't. Not even close.

"I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman may have exulted in Song of Myself, and I think most of us do. But few collections of multitudes can have been so wholly contradictory as those contained by Maurice. I'll touch on just one here: side by side with his enchantment with celebrity, talent, glitz, and being where the action was, was his abiding love of nature and the solacing quietude that comes with immersion in it.

Where did this come from in him? How did it get there? I don't know: I only know that it was always part of him intermittently. And in the last twenty years of his life, it became one of his transcendent, transforming refuges.

Once, sitting on my porch in Arkansas, he saw a black-and-blue mourning cloak
butterfly lit on a snapdragon. Maurice leaned towards it, then stayed perfectly still. The butterfly, likewise, remained on the flower for a long time, its only movement the two wings, fanning like breath.

I had come out the door, and I too stood still, watching not only the butterfly, but watching my father watch the butterfly. When it flew away, he turned and looked up at me. Normally ebullient and wildly talkative, he was wholly quiet. His usually animated face was both illuminated and still, silenced by wonder, even awe, and peace. He looked as if he had seen the face of God and creation itself, and was still stunned by it.

Whatever he found in that butterfly had been with him for awhile. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he met my mother, the former Charlotte Shapiro, in a class on French Romantic poetry. And one of the ways he courted her was by taking her canoeing on Lake Mendota. Where and how did a wholly nonathletic, overly intellectual, skinny, neurotic, glasses-wearing Brooklyn boy get that?

Later, after they married, Maurice and Charlotte rambled England's Lake District, as famous for its natural beauty as its poets.

Still later, as a couple with children, they resided uneasily in the suburbs of New York City, Westchester County. My mother would have preferred "real country", my father, Greenwich Village or the Left Bank. Westchester, a compromise, left them both unhappy and resentful. Yet even there, Maurice, Charlotte and I (I don't remember my 7-years-older brother ever coming along) occasionally went on long walks together, often around the less-developed parts of Tibbett's Brook Park.

By then, they were both famous, my mother as a children's book author and editor, my father as a biographer. The Zolotows were, as the above cover, from the September, 1951 Writer's Digest says, a "Big-Time Writing Team. " They were also, increasingly, big-time unhappy. My father's drinking, my mother's martyrdom, and the generally anxious, repressed, and sexist tenor of the times, captured accurately in the television series Mad Men: all these played a part. I've written, too, about both their casual, medically and socially sanctioned drug-taking in this post. They divorced in 1969 (I was sixteen.) A year later, my father moved to Los Angeles. A year after that, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

And it was in those last twenty sober years of his life that his love of the natural world took its deepest root in him. He became a member of both the Sierra Club
and the Audubon Society and went on Sunday hikes sponsored by both
organizations, often. (Left, a picture of Solstice Canyon, one I believe he hiked, from the Los Angeles Sierra Club's site). "Isn't it amazing, Cres?" he would ask me rhetorically, bursting with his customary enthusiasm, when I came to visit him in LA. "Here we are, in the middle of a city, but you can smell the night-blooming jasmine and orange blossoms, and do you know, in just 20 minutes --- 20 minutes! --- I can be out on a hike or a bird walk in a canyon!"

It was in this phase, too, that he had that encounter with the mourning cloak butterfly on my porch. He came to visit me at least once a year in Arkansas.

And sometimes we floated the King's River. "Oh, yes," said my father confidently before we put in the first time. "Of course I know how to canoe. I used to take your mother canoeing on Lake Mendota, you know." But that was a lake, 40-some years earlier, and this was a river; albeit a gentle one, there were little rills of white water. My father wasn't kidding anyone. He was scared, but he was psyched. He was up for it.

My friend George West, who organized the whole thing, always remembers that my father showed up wearing a safari jacket. George still says, fondly, "Here it was, the King's, to me a very placid little creek, not at all challenging. I looked at Maurice and it was clear that to him it was like, The African Queen. And I realized, anything could be, with that level of enthusiasm and adventure. Walking to the mailbox could be The African Queen. And that was what Maurice gave me. "

The first float we took together --- that time 'we' being me, George West, my late husband, Ned, and my friend Suzanne, then Suzanne Euler, now Suzanne Tucker, and Maurice --- he was still youngish, maybe 63 or 64. He still had some pretty good
vision, was in decent shape, and, with George's help --- George being the most experienced canoeist present --- Maurice could participate fairly fully. (Left: a family portrait of my friends, the dear Mitchell-West clan, left to right: George West, Starr Mitchell, Logan and Cane West, their sons, to whom I am a Cres-Aunt).

But there were a few Mr. Magoo moments that day on the river: George calling out, "Watch out for that branch, Maurice!", Maurice whispering to me (I was in the bow, he in the stern that trip) sotto vocce, "Cres? Do you see a branch?" two seconds before starting to get lightly smacked in the face by the branch, and then, belatedly, ducking. (Of course everyone present could hear his covert whispers to me.)

These days I live in Vermont, not Arkansas. Ned, my husband, has been dead for almost ten years; Maurice, almost twenty. My present, and for-the-duration partner, David, is older than Maurice would have been on that first float. And I take a lot of walks.

Rarely is there a day, at this time in my life, when a walk in the green cathedral of the woods does not, at least for a moment, lift me out of myself. Most often it's the light: the way it comes through the trees, dappling the leaf- or pine-needle covered path or sending an almost Biblical ray down to illuminate a single leaf or, as I wrote about here, the ears of a deer. Since the land I walk is honeycombed with water, springs and seeps and little creeks and marshy areas, sometimes it's water, or light on water, or the sound of water, or a combination of all three.

But often it's wildlife: bird, insect, reptile, mammal. Wild, life: both the wildness --- untamed, unpredictable --- and the life . A tiny burnt-orangey-red salamander (an eft, they're called) on the path, can thrill me, as can a bumblebee, droning drowsily as it moves from wild rose to foam flower in the deep woods, if I stand still and just watch it for awhile.

And the other daya plump brownish gray and white chickenish-shaped game
bird ran across the old gravel road, the part hardly anyone travels, right in front of me.
It was making first a
soft, melodious clucking, which later, as it rustled in the brush &
ferns, turned into an almost purring sound. When I came home, I spent a little time trying to ID it on the Internet (as if that would or could have made it
more wondrous). I think it was a Spruce Grouse. (Picture, right, from
audobon.com, taken by a Glenn Tepke.)

But it was its sound, especially that strange almost-purr that spoke most to me, even more than its shape, beauty, and, for me, rarity.

For sound, like light, water, and greenness, often brings that lifting-out-of-one's-own-small-world, too. The woods and meadows are loud with birds this time of year, in contrast to the near-complete stillness of winter in Vermont.

Which brings me back to the rustle I heard in the woods the other day, and to my father, and to the King's River --- the final float we took together. By then my father's eyesight was very poor, but he still wanted to go.

What did I learn from my father? In that earlier post, I mentioned much of what I imbibed from him about writing and being a writer. But of course, there was - is - more.

Enthusiasm. Joie de vivre. Digging under the surface to find the deeper intricacies of the story, of almost anything and anyone. Reading. Quoting the greats, always with attribution (it is his influence that has brought both Heraclitus and Walt Whitman into this post, for instance.)

Most of all, I think Maurice gave me a sense that a continual falling in love with the world was possible and desirable, despite its --- and one's own --- losses, sorrows, and limitations.

On that final float, we rounded a bend, and George (with Ned in the canoe ahead of Maurice and me). said suddenly, softly, urgently, pointing with his paddle, "Blue heron! One-o'clock!"

My father, the bird-lover, with equal urgency: "Where, where?"

Me (softly, pointing a few feet to the right): "Just there, Maurice."

He turned his head in the direction I was pointing, and said, in a voice wretched with disappointment, "I can't see it."

Just then the great blue heron took off from the stream in which it had been standing. They are big birds, with a wing-span that ranges between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 feet. And this one flew right over our heads. Right, directly over the canoe in which Maurice and I sat.

Those huge wings beat the air, bearing the heron up and over us. Slowly. Audibly. A pause between each wingbeat.

Beat.

Beat.

Beat.

My father tipped his chin up. And he said, in a voice that was overwhelmed with a joy, gratitude, and a deep satisfaction even larger than his sorrow of a few seconds before, "I can hear it, though."

(Picture above, again not "our" heron, but by Jules Frederick. I am so grateful to have found this image!)

September 28, 2009

Y'all know I am given to writing long, thoughtful, wrestling-with-big-questions blog posts --- what my friend and fellow cookbook writer / memoirist Ronni Lundy called "blongs" (as in "blog" plus "long"). But you can teach an old dragon new tricks. This is a quickie.

Every time I hear the coverage about Polanski's extradition on a 30 year-old charge (which, I just learned on NPR, even the then-13 girl, now 45-year-old woman, has asked be dropped, saying she long since gotten over it) I remember the incident I'm about to tell and start laughing.

I figure since most of the readers of "nothing is wasted on the writer" already know a little about Maurice from this last post, I could pass it on, a P.S. on that irrepressible man, whose DNA and craziness I am proud to carry...

(Though he was primarily a show-business biographer, Maurice did
occasionally write on food, travel, wine, and spirits. An article her wrote for Playboy, on absinthe, has just been posted: it was written in 1971 and was the last piece he wrote
on alcohol before he sobered up. He kept the original of the
accompanying illustration to the article, which I've reproduced below, in his L.A. living room: a bottle with a skull inside, behind bars).

But, to MZ & Roman P.

"So I'm at this Hollywood party," says Maurice, this would have been some time in the late 70's. "And suddenly this guy cuts across the room and strides over to me, very purposefully. And I see it's Roman Polanski. And he sticks out his hand, and gives a little half-bow, and says, 'I am Polanski.' I figure he had to have me confused with someone else."

"What did you say?" I asked.

"What could I say?" said Maurice, with one of his exaggerated shrugs. "I stuck out my hand, and shook his, and said, 'I am Zolotow.' "